Pioneering Kiwi artist and feminist set out to produce ‘new myths for our time’
Vivian Lynn, who has died aged 87 after a long illness, was a respected artist and teacher who made an important contribution to art in New Zealand. She was a pioneering feminist whose paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and installations addressed her sense of what it meant and felt like to be a woman in a maledominated world. Though her work was always political, she was suspicious of bandwagons and she toiled independently to devise a visual language that brought body and mind, nature and culture, reason and desire into productive conversation.
Lynn was born in Wellington in 1931 and grew up in
Lower Hutt. Even before high school she attended art classes with Frederick Ellis at Wellington Technical College, learning to draw the plaster casts of classical sculptures then housed there. She was educated at Wellington Girls’ College, and the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University College. She then spent a year in Auckland at the Teachers’ College, before returning to Wellington to head the art department at the Hutt Valley Memorial Technical College in Petone between 1953 and 1956. This was an exciting time to be an art educator, and Lynn contributed to the innovative teaching practices developed by the likes of James Coe and Gordon Tovey under the inspirational leadership of director of education C E Beeby.
Lynn’s commitment to teaching was reignited when she settled back in Wellington in 1973 after her marriage ended. She taught drawing for several years, firstly at Victoria University’s extension department, then at Wellington Polytechnic School of Design in two lengthy stints (1975-82 and 1988-97). She will be remembered for her technical accomplishments, her experimental use of materials, and her deep knowledge of philosophy, feminist theory, art, science and history.
Lynn’s art career got under way in the 1960s. Her early work was in part inspired by her natural surroundings: the garden, bush, rolling country and mountains of South Canterbury where she was then living. Over time her tree studies and semi-abstract canvases gave way to fully abstract prints and paintings that drew on ancient myths and symbols based on an extensive period of reading occasioned by long periods of serious ill-health, followed later by travel to Europe, Egypt and North America.
It is through this period that Lynn began questioning the roles women were expected to play in society as wives and mothers and, in the art world, as secondary to their male peers. Though enjoying growing success, with her works included in exhibitions across the country, she questioned the expectations placed on artists to develop a signature style, and began to produce both highly realistic images and abstract compositions, and experiment with unconventional materials including spray-paint, string, hair, jelly, and different print media.
Her thinking came to fruition in the 1970s and 80s when she produced major bodies of work that anatomised her views on the failings of modern society, including Book of Forty Images (1973) and Playground and 50s Models series (1975 and 1977), and she began to use human and synthetic hair and skin-like processed paper in increasingly large-scale sculptures such as Guarden Gates (1982) and Lamella-Lamina (1983). These found an appreciative audience and she was included in major exhibitions.
Though never joining the Women’s Art Movement, Lynn actively advocated for women artists and was instrumental in securing funding (in 1983) for the Women’s Art Archive, a substantial series of taped interviews of women artists that has since become a valuable historical resource. In 1982, with Barbara Strathdee, she also organised a national seminar for women at the F1 Sculpture Project in Wellington. She has mentored many younger artists, and been a source of inspiration for those in the art world who had the good fortune to get to know her.
Lynn had to grapple with extended periods of poor health, which incapacitated her for years at a time. Undaunted, she treated it as a rich source of subject matter, in works such as Pharmacopoeia (1983) and Spin: Versor Versari, a solo installation that included largescale images of her own MRI scans presented at City Gallery Wellington in 1997. Delving into the realms of genetics and microbiology, she used her condition as a metaphor for a wider consideration of human and environmental wellbeing.
In recent times Lynn has received renewed attention. A substantial retrospective was staged at Victoria University’s Adam Art Gallery in 2008, and her work featured in the Dowse Art Museum’s Embodied Knowledge exhibition earlier this year. Such initiatives will ensure her legacy, but there is still much to do to properly assess her contribution.
Vivian Lynn set out to produce, in her own words, ‘‘new myths for our time’’. Her courage, insights, empathy and intelligence will not be forgotten. She is survived by her partner of more than 50 years, artist Ju¨ rgen Waibel, her sons Simon and Julian, and her granddaughter Isabella. – By Christina Barton